An iOS wish list
Before you start thinking “this man should just switch to Android”, please read the last paragraph below and then come back here.
I feel as though everybody has one of these lists. Some take a “developer’s view” into how the OS should behave. (“Yeah, I’d like, uhh, for you to expose an API for blah so that I can Apple TV with my bloo.”) Others are more front-end and user experience focused. For still others, it resembles a “power user’s” hit list of crazy things they want an OS to do. (“Yeah, when I’m driving, right, and the phone is clearly away from my face, make the default audio interface the car’s bluetooth and go to speaker – but only if my mom is also not in the car.”)
I think I’m somewhere between the developer-view and the UX-view. I think my list isn’t just some “wouldn’t it be cool if” but rather features that should be cleaned up to deal with scale: things compounded and getting worse because of the scale of messages we get, the ever-growing number of apps we use, the number of people we talk to regularly, the number of taps and authentications we must perform to even do the simplest of actions. These things weren’t an issue too long ago, but now that we live in a world where I have a giant folder just for “anonymous apps” on my phone, well, we need to clean the game up a bit.
So, here’s my currently pressing iOS wish list:
• Allow me to set protocol handler defaults. That is, “mailto:” always opens in Gmail.app and “http://” always opens in Chrome.app. (As opposed to some apps taking me to Chrome and others taking me to Safari when I wish not to). For political reasons, this may never happen, but I hope it eventually comes mirroring behavior as on our desktops.
• Share cookies across web views. I understand the reason for application-specific sandboxes and the reason web views are not shared between applications. But I wonder if there’s another way to do this. Perhaps, by default, the app gets its own web view sandbox, but then the user is given the option to “use” an existing keychain/cookie store. Otherwise, you keep having to log into the same services across different apps. And let me tell you, with ever more applications using two-factor authentication and with the use of password helpers like 1Password, logging in feels like it takes up a quarter of my day. I wonder if the “use shared store” action alone is enough to get around the security issues that a separate sandbox solves. It’s not only keychain, but also your cookies and profiles as well that might need this sharing. By explicitly asking the user for permission to drop their keychain into a view, might we be able to get around attacks that might originate inside the web views? Anything else on the security front I am missing here with this thinking?
• Give me dark-silent. One of the hacks I’ve taken to using is to turn off all lock screen notifications. I don’t need to be interrupted hundreds of times each day. Most of the time, I’m not around to see the notifications anyway and each just end up waking up the screen for a few seconds at a time (and, therefore, eating up battery life). For a while, I wished that the “silent” hard button wouldn’t just go to silent sound/vibrate mode, but make the screen silent as well. A dark-silent, if you will.
• That hack notwithstanding, we still need a better way to manage notifications. What a disaster these are on our phones. With every new app wanting to turn them all on in order to get engagement and repeated usage, it seems to me that managing them individually is just crazy. There are too many notification toggles per app. Perhaps a different method is to introduce some sort of notification buckets that apps could be dropped into that all have a different notification profile. I like the following four buckets:
•• No thanks, never, nothing (the way I force apps that really misbehave…my punishment is to block them fully forever)
•• Yes, thanks, app icon notifications only (the way I force nearly all apps)
•• Yes, thanks, notifications in the drawer and app icon adjustments (the way I have WUT and most other apps setup)
•• Yes, and wake up audio & screen; very important (like Phone and iMessage)
• Send my iMessages (and SMSes) in the background. Just send it – that’s what I told you to do in the first place. My Sony Ericsson candy bars from 2001 had this feature. By default, the message should send at the next available opportunity (or, in the case of total network failure, at least try three times before giving up so as to save battery). I always liked this simple feature back in the day: you could compose a text and jump into the subway or elevator and it would get sent whenever the next signal opportunity arose. (I never have to send the same text twice after waiting the progress bar to take its sweet, sweet time only to let me down with a failure.)
• If I see a notification, mark it as read/seen not only in the notifications drawer, but inform the app to clear it as well. Nothing more infuriating than to “read” a text in Notifications, only to read it and mark it once more inside iMessages. I can’t tell you the number of times a day I have to do this. If you’re anything like me (maybe a little OCD), you do this every hour to make for a clean inbox.
• A better way to manage apps. I currently have it setup so that anything I buy on the desktop shows up on automatically on iPhone and iPad. That’s nice and that’s the way it should have always worked. But managing the long tail of apps that are on the phone is just impossible. Some are in folders, some are on different screens and, most of the time, I can’t remember where an app actually is. If an app is not on the home screen, I’ve taken to just using Spotlight to get to it. So it makes me wish Spotlight was better – and that Spotlight was accessible not only from the home view, but from any view, even if you’re in an app. We type URLs to get to web sites, not too hard to think I could just type an app’s name to get to it. This is sort of like bookmarks in your browser: we used to bookmark every single site and put them into neat folders and hierarchies, but now you have a few common ones on your “bookmarks bar”; everything else is solved with search.
• As someone who develops software as well, I’m tempted to put in an API request or two in here. But I’m not convinced a Siri API or a Spotlight API is at the top of my list. For instance, It would be great if Spotlight would index and allow deep links into apps: a place search for “Lever House” goes straight into foursquare, but such an index is expensive to create and to store, so I don’t know how one could elegantly solve that. It’s one thing to index all 16 GB of your phone’s disk, but another thing entirely to pull in an index of 50MM+ venue names from foursquare into your local store (or all your files from your 100GB Dropbox). Didn’t greplin try to solve something like this back in the day? One new API wish I would add is to introduce a TouchID API: but one that is only for secondary “unlocking”, much as it works with iTunes app store now. There are plenty of apps out there for which I have long, complex passwords: 1Password, bank apps, Oscar Health. These apps should auto-lock as soon as they background for security reasons, but if I foreground them within a certain time window, it would be nice to TouchID myself into them. I’d worry that too many apps might use this as a primary means of authentication, something that it is not meant for, but let’s just leave that to app developers to decide.
And before anyone jumps in to ask/scold me to get an Android: I use both OSes, but time and again, I keep coming back to iPhone as my primary interface. I could ask Android many of these same questions, too. I prefer iPhone at the moment and like it despite all its faults, because I have the best of Google software (all their apps like Gmail and Maps and Drive and its ability to keep my profile synced) paired with the things I like about Apple software and hardware. I also like that many pieces of software are still iOS-first, so why would I want to miss out on trying new things and staying up to date? I also prefer to develop in XCode and iOS because the environment is just so amazing and quicker for me to prototype and play with ideas.